[3] In the following sections, there is a general introduction to the orders and sorting methods currently in use, focused on those which are more popular and effective.
YES[b] is a simplified stroke-based sorting method free from stroke counting and grouping, without comprise in accuracy.
And it has been successfully applied to the indexing of all the characters in the Xinhua Zidian and Xiandai Hanyu Cidian.
The radical usually lies on the upper part or left side of a character and helps to express its meaning.
[11][12] For example, 花 (flower), 草 ( grass), 菜 (vegetable) all have the radical of 艹 (艸, 草, glass/plant), which indicates they are related to plant; 推 (push), 拉 (pull), 打(beat) share the radical of 扌 (手, hand), and are actions normally involving hands.
Then, according to the page number, find the radical family in the character lookup table in stroke-based order.
The first radical system in history was created by a Chinese Scholar Xu Shen in his Shuowen Jiezi dictionary almost two thousand years ago in the Eastern Han Dynasty.
The Four-Corner Method assigns a 4-digit code to a character, each digit representing one corner of the block.
[18] A fifth digit can be added to represent an extra part above the lower-right corner to gain higher sorting accuracy.
For example, the extended code of character 佳 is 24214, where the fifth digit 4 represents component 十 above the final 一 in the lower-right corner.
For example, the Cangjie codes of the characters in 漢字排檢法 (Methods for Chinese character sorting and retrieving) are 漢(ETLO)字(JND)排(QLMY)檢(DOMO)法(EGI), and can be sorted into a Cangjie-code order of 檢(DOMO)法(EGI)漢(ETLO)字(JND)排(QLMY).
For example, "归并 (guībìng), 归还 (guīhuán), 规划 (guīhuà), 鬼话(guǐhuà), 桂花 (guìhuā)".
For example, "归并 (guībìng), 规划 (guīhuà), 鬼话 (guǐhuà), 桂花 (guìhuā), 归还 (guīhuán)".
[25] Pinyin-based sorting is very convenient for looking up characters or words of which you know their pronunciation and Pinyin expressions.
It consists of a table (or alphabet) of letters or symbols in the order of and 5 tone diacritics of “ˉ, ˊ, ˇ, ˋ, ˙”.
For example, the Bopomofo order for the characters in “注音字母排序法 (Bopomofo-based sorting)” is “排(ㄆㄞˊ)母(ㄇㄨˇ)法(ㄈㄚˇ)序(ㄒㄩˋ)注(ㄓㄨˋ)字(ㄗˋ)音 (ㄧㄣ)”.
[31] The most serious limitation of sound-based orders is their lack of support to look up words with unknown pronunciation.
The first surviving Chinese dictionary Erya (date from the 3rd century BC) is arranged by semantic classification.
For instance, entry where the ending "君也" means (the previous words are) synonyms of "君 (king)".
[35] Their classification systems are much more accurate and detailed than the ancient dictionaries, but still need indexes of radicals or strokes.
And the answers to these questions may vary between the user and compiler of the dictionary, and that will lead to difficulties in word lookup.
In fact, radical-based sorting is meaning-based to a certain degree, because in many cases the radical represents the semantic category of a character, e.g., radical 氵(water) in character 江(river), 扌(hand) in 推 (push) and 艹 (grass) in 花草 (flowers and grasses).
[39] The first frequency list of Chinese characters based on a corpus was created by Chen Heqin (陳鶴琴).
The frequency data came from a grand corpus with a number of sub-corpora representing the Chinese languages in the three regions of Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan and in the two time periods of the 1960s and 1980/1990's.
For example, according to the Pinyin, Radical and Stroke-based orders used in the Xiandai Hanyu Cidian (version 7),[43] the five words of [爱, 好, 好事, 好人, 好人家] are arranged in the following orders: There are software applications to support sorting and lookup of Chinese characters on the computer.